Title: Aftermath
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: None
Disclaimer: I do not own.
She observed the crowd of benders. Benders of every type, from every nation had gathered together. They were all staring at her with the hatred of a thousand burning white-hot suns. They knew her secret, her curse. They knew that she was the Avatar. There was no chance of escape for her. The world was united against her.
She wished that being the Avatar still meant to be a blessing to the world not the curse. She had learned the truth when she contacted the Avatars of the past. The change in public opinion resulted from an epic battle between Avatar Aang and a corrupted Fire Lord. Aang took away the Fire Lord's ability to bend. He hid what happened from the world, which was perhaps his biggest mistake. When people found out, they panicked. They had accepted that the Avatar could bend all 4 elements, but being able to bend bending? It was too much.
Then, what made it worse, was the story got all twisted up. Every story gets twisted as it is passed from generation to generation. This tale got particularly twisted. For the first few generations, the tale was pretty true to events. But as time progressed, the Fire Lord became less corrupt, and Avatar Aang became more villainous. And the people believed it. When she was a child, she was warned by her grandmother to beware the Avatar, it was something all children knew. When she found out she was the new incarnation of the Avatar, she had hoped that people would see her as just herself, not as the Avatar. But that didn't work out. Her best friend betrayed her.
As she watched the angry crowd that wanted her dead, she wondered if it ever crossed Aang's mind that it might have been better to have just killed the Fire Lord. If Aang had done that, nothing would've changed. Avatar Aang would've been largely forgotten, being unremarkable from the other Avatars. And the new Avatar would have had a much longer life expectancy.